Der Hauptmann (The Captain) is a recent German movie about the real-life deserter who impersonated an officer and ended up building a team of psychopathic underlings for murdering (mostly) prisoners. Excellent acting, good visuals, poor special effects.

The Homesman is sort of a Western, but a very unconventional one. Even stranger than Unforgiven, it’s well acted, beautifully filmed, and the story is anything but predictable. Highly recommended, as is Unforgiven.

Lawlessis a pretty well acted and filmed gangster movie with a decent degree of realism to it. Special effects are realistic but rather tame when it comes to showing blood.

The Immigrant wins on the quality of acting, the unpredictable story and the excellent period atmosphere created. Recommended.

The most recent iteration of Mowgli flops badly, with the script diverging from the book and with cartoon characters of animals presented with humanoid features that make all of them look rather creepy. Avoid.

Riphagen, another movie based on a real historic fiend, is well done and acted despite minimal budget. Highly recommended.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a typical Coen Brothers movie: interesting in parts, uneven in pacing and storytelling. Worth watching once if you like Westerns.

The Road to Calvary is a much better adaptation of the book than the several previous attempts, and better than the book itself as well. Well worth watching for the excellent acting and a convoluted, detailed drama.

Ten minutes after the three-day World Rimfire Challenge marksmanship event wrapped up, the skies opened up. Rain fell hard and fast, causing some flash flooding. As the event organizers were dismantling the camp, I noticed these two girls and a boy running around helping. All three were wet, muddy, tired and smiling. Turns out they volunteered to help and found tasks for themselves without any prompting by parents or event admins.

That kind of attitude is rare enough in adults, and is most commendable in kids. Skills may be acquired later, but attitude like this comes from the basic character. I know who I would want to work with in the future.

The utterly illogical and pointless nature of the US gun laws can be illustrated with this simple example. Let’s take a gun owner who has an AR15 rifle.

An ordinary carbine with a 16 inch barrel.

Since barrels are available in different lengths, the owner pays a $200 excise tax to the BATF, waits 6-12 months and finally gets permission to use a barrel shorter than 16 inches. Here’s how a 14.5″ barrel looks on a rifle. The difference of 1.5″ inches is legally significant, though it makes only a minor impact on the actual performance and handling.

With the overall length of the rifle around 35 inches, 1.5 inch difference is pretty hard to tell.

Now, imagine that this person owns more two nearly identical AR15, one of them registered as a short-barreled rifle, and takes both to the range. For cleaning following the range time, both guns are disassembled.

If the owner accidentally puts the 16″ barrel on the registered lower and the 14.5″ barrel on the unregistered lower, he commits are felony “manufacturing of an unregistered short barreled rifle (SBR)” which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine. Note that there’s zero change in the actual functionality of the guns: the lower receivers are identical, and the upper receivers are still in possession of the same person who already paid for the “privilege” of using a shorter barrel.

The punishment for the accidental swapping of very similar uppers is harsher than most penalties for forcible rape, armed robbery and murder! How does that make any sense whatsoever?

On my way back from Pyramyd Air Cup 2018, I took a snapshot of a young child at Columbus airport. The eye-tracking feature of my new Sony camera worked extremely well, getting the focus just right even at 2.8 fairly close up. The kid’s mother and I talked for a while, turned out she was also heading to Nashville.

Today, I took a few studio photos of them. I’ve only edited one so far, but quite a few came out well. The kid, being a very positive, smiley cherub, stole the show.

The kid’s aunt, his mother’s younger sister, came along for company and also ended up on camera. This way, I met interesting people and gained an interesting local model. I like how things just work out.